WINNING STRATEGIES FOR POWER PRESENTATIONS; Jerry Weissman Delivers
Lessons From the World's Best Presenters by Jerry Weissman
The loci method was used in ancient Rome by Marcus Tullius Cicero,
the first century philosopher, statesman, and orator. When Cicero
and his contemporaries delivered their lengthy speeches in the Roman
Forum, they spoke without notes because paper had yet to be
invented. So the speakers used the marble columns of the Forum as
memory triggers. Each column represented a single subject and its
related ideas. As the tour guides at the ruins of the Forum tell it
today, the orators delivered their speeches, striding from column to
column and subject to subject, using the columns as visual prompts
to remind them of a group of related ideas.
Over the years, this technique has morphed into the popular "Roman
Room" memory method, in which physical objects inside a room serve
the same associative purpose as the open air columns of the ancient
Roman Forum.
Maureen Dowd of the "New York Times," inspired by Mr. Foer's book,
found two other writers with intriguing memory aids:
* Mark Twain, who "once wrote the first letter of topics that he
wanted to cover in a lecture on his fingernails."
* England's Ed Cooke, the author of "Remember, Remember" and a Roman
Room devotee who recommends, "If you have a list to remember, you
put the items in a path throughout a familiar place, like your
childhood home."
Mr. Cooke, who is also the co-founder of Memrise, a website focused
on memory, related the technique directly to presentations. In a
2008 article in London's "The Guardian," he wrote:
"Begin by reducing your talk to, let's say, 20 bullet-points....
Write out your points in order. Now find an image that captures each
point. To remember that the pound is losing ground on the dollar,
you could imagine George Bush beating up Gordon Brown with a wad of
dollar bills. If you wish to remember that 90% of women are at a
disadvantage in the workplace, you might imagine a 90-year-old woman
carrying a heavy weight. Then arrange your images on a route around
a familiar space. So the Bush-Brown scenario could go in your
bathroom sink, the granny could go in your shower, and the next 18
images could be arranged sequentially in a route around your home."
In my coaching version of Mr. Cooke's advice, I go back to Cicero
and recommend that speakers and presenters cluster the diverse
components of their pitches into a few conceptual Roman columns, or
main themes; and then to represent those ideas in simple PowerPoint
slides designed under the Less is More principle. The memory prompt
then comes from a specific image rather than from an imaginary
physical layout.
Financial executives, with their usual attention to detail and
concern about forward-looking statements, often prepare their
presentations as complete text on paper or on slides, and then they
read or try to memorize the words. Those approaches force the
presenter to stay connected to the text and disconnected from the
audience.
One public company's chief financial officer showed up for his
coaching session with his presentation written out in full
sentences. I asked him to reduce each sentence to a four-word bullet
and to speak from that. He did and it flowed. Then I asked him to
reduce each four-word bullet to one word and to speak from that. He
did and it flowed. Then I asked him to speak without any text. He
did and it flowed. We then put the four-word bullets on the slides
and he delivered his pitch directly to the audience and it flowed.
Of course, you can always skip the PowerPoint slides and, like Mark
Twain, write the first letter of each of your subjects on your
fingernails or, like Sarah Palin, write notes on your palm. Then
again, you can default to those old standby 3-by-5 index cards. But
every time you glance down, you will not only disconnect from your
audience, you will also appear to be unsure about what to say and
diminish your credibility.
Better to go with Cicero's columns and PowerPoint.
CHAPTER TWO
Kill Your Darlings
"A Lesson from Professional Writers"
Historian Amanda Foreman, the author of the bestselling "Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire," followed it a decade later with "A World on
Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War." In
describing her creative process for the "Wall Street Journal's"
"Word Craft" column, she provided a valuable lesson for presenters:
"The fruit of my 11 years of research meant that I had more than 400
characters scattered over four regions.... This vast mass of
material was so unwieldy that I could hardly work my way through the
first day of the conflict, let alone all four years."
While few presenters spend 11 years developing their stories about
their businesses, they, like Ms. Foreman, have a vast mass of
unwieldy material that they have to communicate to various
audiences. Unfortunately, most presenters then proceed to deliver
that mass to their audiences in full, inflicting the dreaded effect
known as MEGO or "My Eyes Glaze Over."
Although Ms. Foreman is a respected scholar with a doctorate in
history from Oxford University, she has storytelling in her DNA. Her
father was Carl Foreman, an Oscar-winning screenwriter who wrote the
classic film "The Bridge on the River Kwai." At the end of her
research, Ms. Foreman realized that, even for a story as immense and
complex as the Civil War, she had too much information for both
writer and reader to process. Her solution:
"I plotted the time lines of my 400 characters and identified and
discarded people who, no matter how interesting their stories, had
no connection to anyone else in the book. This winnowed my cast down
to 197 characters, all bound to one another by acquaintance or one
degree of separation."
Ms. Foreman was tapping into a practice--well-known among
professional writers--called, "kill your darlings." In fact, a
community of writers in Atlanta has adopted that name for its
website. The phrase is often attributed to Nobel Prize novelist
William Faulkner, but it was actually coined by Sir Arthur Quiller-
Couch, a British writer and critic who, in his 1916 publication "On
the Art of Writing," said:
"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally
fine writing, obey it--whole-heartedly--and delete it before sending
your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."
The sentiment was echoed by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely,
the screenwriters of "Captain America," the Hollywood action film
based on the 70-year-old comic strip character. In another "Wall
Street Journal" "Word Craft" article, the team wrote:
"Adapting an existing work for film is usually a process of
reduction. Whether it's a novel or a short story, a true-crime tale
or 70 years' worth of comic books, the first job is distillation. If
this means losing someone's favorite character, so be it. The simple
fact is that we can't put everything on the screen. Darlings must
die."
_________________________________________________________________
***** ABOUT THE AUTHOR ***** (ZT)
Jerry Weissman, the world's #1 corporate presentations consultant,
is known for his executive coaching sessions. Weissman's private
client list includes the top brass at Yahoo!, Intuit, Cisco,
Microsoft, HP, Dolby Labs, and many others. His techniques have
helped nearly 600 client firms create persuasive IPO road show
presentations that have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in
the stock market and hundreds of other public and pre-public firms
to develop and deliver crucial business presentations.
Weissman is the president of Power Presentations, Ltd., and the
author of the bestsellers "Presenting to Win," "Presentations in
Action," "The Power Presenter," and "In the Line of Fire: How to
Handle Tough Questions...When It Counts."
_________________________________________________________________
Lessons From the World's Best Presenters by Jerry Weissman
The loci method was used in ancient Rome by Marcus Tullius Cicero,
the first century philosopher, statesman, and orator. When Cicero
and his contemporaries delivered their lengthy speeches in the Roman
Forum, they spoke without notes because paper had yet to be
invented. So the speakers used the marble columns of the Forum as
memory triggers. Each column represented a single subject and its
related ideas. As the tour guides at the ruins of the Forum tell it
today, the orators delivered their speeches, striding from column to
column and subject to subject, using the columns as visual prompts
to remind them of a group of related ideas.
Over the years, this technique has morphed into the popular "Roman
Room" memory method, in which physical objects inside a room serve
the same associative purpose as the open air columns of the ancient
Roman Forum.
Maureen Dowd of the "New York Times," inspired by Mr. Foer's book,
found two other writers with intriguing memory aids:
* Mark Twain, who "once wrote the first letter of topics that he
wanted to cover in a lecture on his fingernails."
* England's Ed Cooke, the author of "Remember, Remember" and a Roman
Room devotee who recommends, "If you have a list to remember, you
put the items in a path throughout a familiar place, like your
childhood home."
Mr. Cooke, who is also the co-founder of Memrise, a website focused
on memory, related the technique directly to presentations. In a
2008 article in London's "The Guardian," he wrote:
"Begin by reducing your talk to, let's say, 20 bullet-points....
Write out your points in order. Now find an image that captures each
point. To remember that the pound is losing ground on the dollar,
you could imagine George Bush beating up Gordon Brown with a wad of
dollar bills. If you wish to remember that 90% of women are at a
disadvantage in the workplace, you might imagine a 90-year-old woman
carrying a heavy weight. Then arrange your images on a route around
a familiar space. So the Bush-Brown scenario could go in your
bathroom sink, the granny could go in your shower, and the next 18
images could be arranged sequentially in a route around your home."
In my coaching version of Mr. Cooke's advice, I go back to Cicero
and recommend that speakers and presenters cluster the diverse
components of their pitches into a few conceptual Roman columns, or
main themes; and then to represent those ideas in simple PowerPoint
slides designed under the Less is More principle. The memory prompt
then comes from a specific image rather than from an imaginary
physical layout.
Financial executives, with their usual attention to detail and
concern about forward-looking statements, often prepare their
presentations as complete text on paper or on slides, and then they
read or try to memorize the words. Those approaches force the
presenter to stay connected to the text and disconnected from the
audience.
One public company's chief financial officer showed up for his
coaching session with his presentation written out in full
sentences. I asked him to reduce each sentence to a four-word bullet
and to speak from that. He did and it flowed. Then I asked him to
reduce each four-word bullet to one word and to speak from that. He
did and it flowed. Then I asked him to speak without any text. He
did and it flowed. We then put the four-word bullets on the slides
and he delivered his pitch directly to the audience and it flowed.
Of course, you can always skip the PowerPoint slides and, like Mark
Twain, write the first letter of each of your subjects on your
fingernails or, like Sarah Palin, write notes on your palm. Then
again, you can default to those old standby 3-by-5 index cards. But
every time you glance down, you will not only disconnect from your
audience, you will also appear to be unsure about what to say and
diminish your credibility.
Better to go with Cicero's columns and PowerPoint.
CHAPTER TWO
Kill Your Darlings
"A Lesson from Professional Writers"
Historian Amanda Foreman, the author of the bestselling "Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire," followed it a decade later with "A World on
Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War." In
describing her creative process for the "Wall Street Journal's"
"Word Craft" column, she provided a valuable lesson for presenters:
"The fruit of my 11 years of research meant that I had more than 400
characters scattered over four regions.... This vast mass of
material was so unwieldy that I could hardly work my way through the
first day of the conflict, let alone all four years."
While few presenters spend 11 years developing their stories about
their businesses, they, like Ms. Foreman, have a vast mass of
unwieldy material that they have to communicate to various
audiences. Unfortunately, most presenters then proceed to deliver
that mass to their audiences in full, inflicting the dreaded effect
known as MEGO or "My Eyes Glaze Over."
Although Ms. Foreman is a respected scholar with a doctorate in
history from Oxford University, she has storytelling in her DNA. Her
father was Carl Foreman, an Oscar-winning screenwriter who wrote the
classic film "The Bridge on the River Kwai." At the end of her
research, Ms. Foreman realized that, even for a story as immense and
complex as the Civil War, she had too much information for both
writer and reader to process. Her solution:
"I plotted the time lines of my 400 characters and identified and
discarded people who, no matter how interesting their stories, had
no connection to anyone else in the book. This winnowed my cast down
to 197 characters, all bound to one another by acquaintance or one
degree of separation."
Ms. Foreman was tapping into a practice--well-known among
professional writers--called, "kill your darlings." In fact, a
community of writers in Atlanta has adopted that name for its
website. The phrase is often attributed to Nobel Prize novelist
William Faulkner, but it was actually coined by Sir Arthur Quiller-
Couch, a British writer and critic who, in his 1916 publication "On
the Art of Writing," said:
"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally
fine writing, obey it--whole-heartedly--and delete it before sending
your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."
The sentiment was echoed by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely,
the screenwriters of "Captain America," the Hollywood action film
based on the 70-year-old comic strip character. In another "Wall
Street Journal" "Word Craft" article, the team wrote:
"Adapting an existing work for film is usually a process of
reduction. Whether it's a novel or a short story, a true-crime tale
or 70 years' worth of comic books, the first job is distillation. If
this means losing someone's favorite character, so be it. The simple
fact is that we can't put everything on the screen. Darlings must
die."
_________________________________________________________________
***** ABOUT THE AUTHOR ***** (ZT)
Jerry Weissman, the world's #1 corporate presentations consultant,
is known for his executive coaching sessions. Weissman's private
client list includes the top brass at Yahoo!, Intuit, Cisco,
Microsoft, HP, Dolby Labs, and many others. His techniques have
helped nearly 600 client firms create persuasive IPO road show
presentations that have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in
the stock market and hundreds of other public and pre-public firms
to develop and deliver crucial business presentations.
Weissman is the president of Power Presentations, Ltd., and the
author of the bestsellers "Presenting to Win," "Presentations in
Action," "The Power Presenter," and "In the Line of Fire: How to
Handle Tough Questions...When It Counts."
_________________________________________________________________
